Journo request: I'm looking for case studies for an article about the politics of ME in the UK. Especially: 1) People who have been harmed by GET 2) People coerced into GET (e.g. to get benefits) 3) Children who have been harmed or parents accused of abuse. DM or email please! x

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Nat who makes the request has written about ME herself. Here is one example placed on the ME site:

Nathalie Wright talks about the misery of living with ME |Huddersfield Examiner | 26 November 2015From the Huddersfield Examiner, 26 November 2015.

In this thought provoking first-person feature, 22-year-old Nathalie Wright reveals how her life has been devastated by the crippling illness ME. Nathalie grew up in Pole Moor above Slaithwaite, went to Wilberlee Primary School, Crossley Heath School in Halifax and then Greenhead College. Day and night became indistinguishable…

I lost my life as I knew it on November 1, 2013.

For many ME sufferers there is a date etched onto their deepest memory, the traumatic day they became ill with an often life-long disease. At my worst I suffered months of being completely bed-bound and was too weak to even clean up my own sick from the floor beside me. I only had the strength to shower every few weeks (sitting down.) I was 22.

Day and night were indistinguishable because most of the time I was not fully conscious in the way a healthy person is. I could simply pass out at any point.

When the crushing fog around my brain cleared even a little it only allowed me to be more aware of the relentless pain in my thighs and chest accompanied by a constant vice-like grip on my skull. A myriad of other symptoms danced round my body to a rhythm I couldn’t understand. Take away from this piece one fact about ME – it severely limits the patient’s capacity to function as a human being. I was reduced to a body on a bed in the prime of my life (yet in the grand scheme of ME suffering, I consider myself to have got off relatively lightly.)

My ME story began, as is very common, with a fever. I was a final year student studying English at Oxford University and was happy and fulfilled, looking forward to the future. When the fever hit I was working on some coursework and so asked for an extension as I just did not seem to be getting better. My request was denied.

The subsequent weeks were a blurred mix of confusion and helplessness as I felt myself slip further and further into the nadir of the disease. Why couldn’t I move? Why couldn’t I eat? Why could no doctors help me? You may think that with such a serious disease I would have been offered extensive medical support, but the opposite was true. Several GPs brushed me aside as being ‘a little stressed.’ When I asked another how long I could expect to be so severely ill she simply replied: “How long’s a piece of string?” Not only was I condemned to this tortuous illness, but my sentence was indefinite. I was forced to suspend my studies.

Months later when I finally got a referral to hospital (all the while languishing in a house I shared with strangers where I could barely cope to look after myself at all), I was finally officially diagnosed. “You’ll be back up and running in no time” grinned the specialist. I wanted badly to believe him but his words did not reflect reality.

As so often happens with poorly understood illnesses, attempts were made to psychologise my ME. I reluctantly saw a hospital psychologist who seemed determined to find a cause in my immediate environment. After 40 minutes of desperate floundering it seemed he’d hit the jackpot.